[WhyNotHugo]

I move into a neighbourhood of new houses in 2007. One of the guys there worked IT at a university and set up a mailing list of the neighbourhood. It was used successfully for all sorts of coordination, neighbourhood watch, internal news, etc.

There's always someone mis-using it, and the same applies to every other platform. There's always someone hijacking forum threads, or asking questions in comments instead of starting a new topic. None of this is exclusive to email.

[teeray]

Hijacking threads was a problem on our neighborhood mailing list (the most egregious example being hijacking a welcome thread to complain about trash pickup). The solution was pretty easy: auto-lock threads after a week of inactivity. We found that on-topic discussion settled after about that long. People are then forced to start new threads. If there is something new on an old thread, it can be administratively resurrected.

[inigyou]

How do you do that with email?

[teeray]

Your replies are to the mailing list address (we use groups.io). The server gets to decide whether or not to forward your reply to the rest of the mailing list based on the age of the topic.